


What's Good

by getoffmyhead



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: But He Just Wants to Play Hockey, Developing Relationship, Established Relationship, M/M, Relationship Problems, Sid Has Powers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 05:36:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17278073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/getoffmyhead/pseuds/getoffmyhead
Summary: When Sid was a toddler, his tantrums came with ice creeping up the walls. His father told him he would never be able to play hockey if he couldn’t control his temper. It would be too dangerous. In learning to control it, he learned to control himself. Which was great for everything but his relationship.





	What's Good

**Author's Note:**

> Happy New Year! I'm shoving this one out the door because if it sticks around my hard drive any longer, I'm going to make a big long fic out of it, and nobody wants that worldbuilding. I'm exhausted just thinking about it.
> 
> Title from a Fenne Lily song. Fic isn't terribly related.

Sid’s alarm went off at seven, pinging the same shrill tone as usual, but it didn’t wake him. He had been awake for an hour, staring toward his bedroom ceiling in the dark. His limbs felt heavy, immobile. A combined three hours of sleep did him no favors. His alarm pinged again, repeating the pattern of sharp noises. He turned his head on the pillow with tremendous effort to look at it. 

It took a few more rounds of pinging for Sid to reach out and take his phone off his charger to stop it. His arm moved slowly, sluggish. He brought the phone up to his field of vision and hit the snooze on the alarm. The phone glowed at him, waiting. He looked back. He didn’t have any new texts or calls. He even checked Instagram, unsure what he was hoping for, but it was negative for anything new. 

As he stared, the phone flickered. The screen dimmed. Sid blew out a breath and dropped it onto the covers, rolling his eyes. Perfect. A broken phone was just what he needed two hours before skate.

Sid went back to looking up at the ceiling. Maybe he could use the phone as an excuse to skip skate. After all, it was optional. 

His mind played a memory of his first season in the NHL, when he’d wanted to be on the ice all the time with his boundless eighteen-year-old energy. He’d been surprised to find that Mario also attended the optional skates. Even on days he couldn’t take the ice, Mario was there on the bench with his keen eyes and encouraging words. Sid had asked him why. It wasn’t as if Super Mario had anything left to prove. Mario had smiled and clapped him on the shoulder and said, “A captain’s place is at the front of the line. If the team is here, the captain must be first through the door.”

Sid cringed in his bed. His Penguins were in trouble, in a tailspin of a losing streak that didn’t look like it had an end. They’d lost ten in a row. Any more and there would be consequences. A team couldn’t lose like this for long without a major trade or a coaching change. He’d been in hockey long enough to know that. They had to pull up, had to start winning again. For that, they needed their captain to lead the charge.

Sid kicked back the covers and got up. Every movement took ten times the normal effort. He felt exhausted by the time he made it to the sink to brush his teeth. He avoided his eyes in the mirror. He didn’t need to see what his long night had left him looking like. 

Maybe the losing streak was the impetus for everything. Maybe, if they’d been winning, if they’d been happier, this never would have happened. 

The toothbrush clacked against his teeth. When he pulled it back, the bristles were frozen solid. He scowled and dropped it in the holder, then leaned on the sink with both hands. “C’mon. Get together.”

When he looked up, the mirror had fractals of white forming up from the bottom. Sid huffed out a frustrated sigh and stepped back to go get dressed. At least it explained the phone. Electronics never fared well in the cold. 

Experience had taught him not to dwell on his freezing fingers. The more he worried and thought about it, the worse it would get. He practiced his breathing as he went through the motions of getting ready, then drove to the rink a little early to hit the gym. Working out would help get his emotions in check and let him take control again. 

The lights in the locker room were flipped on, but Sid thankfully found it empty. He wasn’t sure he had it in him to talk to Dana just yet, with his affable smile over his ever-present coffee cup. Irritation curled around sadness in a vortex of negativity inside him. He wouldn’t be good company. 

Sid beelined for the weights room after he dropped his things at his stall. He had half an hour before he needed to start getting into his pads, and he would push himself through every second of that.

The ink inside Sid’s pen froze while he was trying to outline his workout. He gritted his teeth and reached for a pencil instead. He left a hefty coating of frost on the handle of the dumbbell through his first set of skullcrushers and nearly lost his grip on it. He dropped it back into place on the rack with an angry clatter and leaned there for a beat. 

When Sid was a toddler, his tantrums came with ice creeping up the walls. His father told him he would never be able to play hockey if he couldn’t control his temper. It would be too dangerous. 

“What happens if you get mad and accidentally freeze someone?”

The idea of hurting someone with his power set him down a path. If he wanted to play, he had to keep control. And he desperately wanted to play. So, Sid learned, little by little, techniques to keep himself calm. He learned deep breathing exercise and meditation, learned that cardio helped a little bit and exerting himself physically helped a lot. He reigned it in until he could get through weeks, months at a time without a slip. 

He would get through this, too. It was just a matter of getting used to it. He reached for another pair of dumbbells, heavier this time, determined to continue.

By the second set, there were only a few zagging lines of white left on the handles when he finished. The third set, nothing froze at all. Relief coursed through him. Maybe he would be able to pull this off without turning the whole rink into a set from the Nutcracker. 

He could hear teammates starting to fill the locker room by the time he was working his last round of bent over rows. Indistinct voices were murmuring, laughing, occasionally hollering. He put his dumbbells back on the rack and took a moment to pace and gather himself before he made his way back toward the locker room.

A chorus of happy voices and corresponding grins greeted him. Most of the team was there. Only a few stalls sat empty, one of which Sid glanced at apprehensively. Geno’s pads were still neatly laid out. His wallet wasn’t in the cubby at the top with his sunglasses. He hadn’t shown up. Maybe he was taking the option. Maybe that was for the best. 

Relieved, Sid strode back to his stall to get changed. Jake was bent over tying his skates, but he grinned up when he saw Sid and immediately launched into an excited endorsement of a new barbeque restaurant he wanted to try. It was hard not to feel settled by Jake’s characteristic enthusiasm while he nodded along and started getting into his gear. 

It took a while before Jake even stopped for breath. Sid got into shin pads, socks, and breezers before he got a word in edgewise. By the time he slid his feet into his skates, he knew more about the difference between Kansas City and St. Louis smoking techniques than he’d ever expected. 

“The guy who owns it almost won Master Chef,” Jake explained without missing a beat, pulling his chest pad on. “And all the sauce is made so you can adjust the spice level however you want.”

“Sounds great, man. We’ll definitely put it on the list,” Sid said as he finished tying his left skate and moved to the right, and that was when Geno finally showed up. 

Sid wasn’t sure why he thought he could do this. He watched Geno stroll in with messy hair, fingers fiddling with his sunglasses, and he felt punched in the gut. Jake was still talking, maybe still about the restaurant, but Sid wasn’t hearing anything past the roaring in his ears. Geno made his way, seemingly in slow motion, to his locker and stripped out of his jacket. Sid watched his hands place his wallet and sunglasses up top. He’d watched those hands before, too, when he couldn’t bear to look anywhere else. They’d been clasped between Geno’s splayed knees while they talked, and Sid couldn’t tear his eyes away from them.

“Sid?” Jake said, voice sharp, and jerked Sid’s attention away from Geno.

“Yeah, sorry. Zoned out. What’s up?”

“Your skate.”

Sid looked down. He was still holding the laces of his right skate in his hands, tightening them. The laces glistened with telltale ice. He didn’t have to move them to know they were coated. He dared a cautious look back up at Jake. 

“Are your skates... frozen?”

“Uh...” Sid’s breath was starting to come fast. His heart raced. 

Jake broke into a huge smile. “That’s amazing! I never knew Dana had it in him. How is he not in here to see your face?” 

Sid cracked a nervous smile. “Right. Yeah. Good prank.”

“I gotta know how he did it.”

“I, uh... I doubt he’ll tell you.” Hell, Dana would probably think the poor kid was losing his mind if he tried to ask. 

“What do you think he used, dry ice? I wonder how he kept them from freezing until you touched them. That is some next-level science class stuff.”

Sid tried to laugh along while carefully pulling on his laces. The nice thing about hockey equipment was it was mostly impervious to long-term effects from freezing. He managed to get them tied before they froze any further. Jake was still speculating on the prank while Sid rushed into his upper pads. He had pulled Rusty into the conversation, and the two of them were playing amateur MythBusters trying to figure it out, never suspecting how simple the answer was. 

Sid pulled his jersey on and stood. His right skate felt a little wobbly, but nothing he couldn’t tolerate. He wouldn’t be able to pull the laces any tighter without freezing them solid, and he couldn’t exactly ask someone else to tie his skate. 

When he started across the locker room, Sid made the mistake of letting his eyes wander back to Geno’s stall. Geno had only gotten into base layers. He was holding a shin pad in both hands and looking at Sid with an unreadable expression. When he found Sid looking back, the expression became questioning.

Sid tore his eyes away and charged out of the locker room. He was the first one to reach the ice. He practically dove onto it, feeling a little desperate for something calming and familiar. 

He took two slow laps and focused on settling his breathing. When nobody else came after him, he hooked his stick over the boards to catch a bucket of pucks behind the bench and dumped them. He snagged one out of the herd to take with him, but the puck tried to stick in place. He frowned back at the patch of ice in front of the bench as he skated away, thinking the pucks must be too warm for the ice, slightly melting the surface. Maybe they got left in a trainer’s office overnight instead of a fridge. 

It only took one handling drill for him to realize nothing was wrong with the puck. It was the ice itself. It was slow and slushy. His skates pushed up snow with every stride and cut deep edges into the surface with each stop. The puck skittered and jumped, stopping abruptly on warmer patches where the ice wasn’t quite set up. It was a common enough problem, especially when it rained and the humidity skyrocketed. It had been a shockingly warm week, so he probably should have guessed the ice would be less than perfect. 

Well, he thought with an internal sigh, at least it gave him an outlet. He glided to a careful stop behind a goal, threw his stick and gloves on top, and looked furtively around for any witnesses. With a bare hand, he knelt down and touched the ice next to the boards with his fingertips. He took a deep breath in and let it out slowly. He closed his eyes and concentrated on his fingers. He thought of cold things: a mountaintop, a frozen lake. 

His mind flashed unbidden to Geno’s long fingers, clasped together while he let Sid down so gently.

“I’m sorry. I think I can’t do this anymore,” he’d said softly. “It’s make me sad a lot. I think it’s bad for me. And maybe you, too. Maybe we both should stop.”

It was bullshit. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Maybe Geno wasn’t happy, but Sid never knew it and certainly never felt the same. That was the worst part, thinking back over the months when Sid had been ecstatically happy, knowing that Geno had been miserable the whole time. Why couldn’t he have said something? Maybe Sid could have fixed it. Maybe he could have made it work if Geno gave him a chance instead of-. 

The ice popped, and Sid yanked his hand back. He opened his eyes to survey the damage. Thankfully, it was only a small, jagged crack along the boards, a tiny canyon. He hastily got up to snag the bottle off the goal and pour enough water to mend the wound. It froze quickly, a testament to the improved ice quality in the small area behind the goal, but he didn’t dare try it again. 

Sid hastily returned the goalie’s bottle, put his gloves back on, and carried his puck away to weave his way through the circles. He cut it close. He only made it through the circles once before his teammates began to pour out onto the ice, several of them looking surprised to find the ice so wrecked already.

“What were you doing out here, Captain? Figure skating?” Rusty called. He wristed a puck out of its spot and it bounced down the ice away from him. 

“I’d pay to see that,” Kessel replied. He also tried to snag a puck and frowned curiously when it didn’t slide more than three inches. 

Sid gave it back with as much fake gusto as he could manage. “Well, I have to do something while I wait for you guys, jeez. What were you doing, your hair?” He hoped his teasing grin looked real enough. It seemed to do the trick for Rusty, who cackled gleefully. 

“Hey man, these locks don’t maintain themselves,” Rusty said, shaking his head. The helmet really detracted from his attempt to show off his mane. 

Sid’s smile dropped away when he caught sight of Geno coming out behind Rusty, the last one through the door. Geno touched the ice and immediately jolted, frowning down like he couldn’t believe the feel of it. Then he looked up straight at Sid, interrogating him with his eyes. It was going to be a long practice. 

Sid got through it by putting his head down and doing what he was told while they ran drills. Thankfully, Sully didn’t want a scrimmage. As second line center, Geno would have been up against Sid for the face-offs, and he couldn’t handle that. He could barely handle the increasingly frustrated looks Geno was throwing his way while they all struggled to keep their footing through handling drills. Sid could feel his eyes even when he didn’t look up. 

When practice was done, Sid powered through the last of Sully’s demands, a quick two laps all the way around the boards, and made for the tunnel without lingering. He could hear the muffled thump of skates behind him, his team coming in fast. He shouldered through the doors of the locker room already pulling his jersey off. By the time he got to his locker, he was tearing at his elbows and chest, ripping the pads off like they burned his skin. He kept his eyes on his task, like he needed full attention to deal with Velcro straps, while the room filled up. 

“Holy shit,” Jake exclaimed, still a little winded when he crashed in next to Sid. “That ice was slow. My legs are Jell-O.”

“What the fuck is wrong with Zam?” Rusty shouted on his way into the room. Sid yanked his skate laces harder than necessary to untie the knot. 

“It’s not the Zam; it’s the AC,” Oleksiak replied. “It got like this in Texas, sometimes. When the humidity was high.”

“It’s November,” Kessel groused. “Why the fuck are we still dealing with humidity?”

Sid practically threw his skates into his locker and yanked his breezers down. He got his socks and shin pads off, and stood up to skin out of his base layers. The hard skate combined with his guilt made him want to get out of there as fast as he could. He changed into warmups and practically bolted for the cardio room for a cooldown. 

To his horror, Geno rose from his seat at the same time and fell into step behind him. Sid wasn’t stupid. Generally, Geno was one of the last guys out of his pads, preferring to slowly undress and unwind. He’d sped up his process, stripping out of his pads in record time to follow Sid out the locker room door. 

“Ice is slow today,” Geno prodded.

Sid glanced back at him with a twinge of annoyance. “We have people who are supposed to deal with that.”

Geno shrugged. “Okay.”

They hit the gym and Sid frowned his way to a treadmill. Geno split off to ride a bike. He was annoyingly present the entire time Sid was running, even though he added an extra five minutes to his jog specifically to avoid getting off the treadmill before Geno left. They met up again on the mats to stretch, and Sid prepared to fend off his questions about the shitty ice. 

The questions didn’t come. Geno offered him a genial smile and bent into his stretches. Around them, guys came and went, working through their own routines in the subdued, post-skate environment. Sid gave the bare minimum of effort on stretching and jumped up to grab a bottle of Gatorade before he left.

Geno followed him out of the gym, too. 

“You got something to say, buddy?” Sid pressed, trying for a joking tone through his actual irritation. 

Geno didn’t laugh. He looked Sid up and down and shrugged. “Just worry, little bit.”

“Worried? What are you worried about?”

Geno side-eyed him and reached to pull him to a stop in the empty hall. “Don’t be mad.”

Sid couldn’t keep the bitter tone out of his laugh. “I won’t be mad. Why would I be mad?” 

Geno pressed his lips together and shoved his hands in his pockets. “I think we need talk.”

Sid’s stomach pitched at the idea. His brain wholly rejected it. “What do we have to talk about?” he asked, trying to back off and finding a wall in the way.

“Sid,” Geno said pleadingly. He looked awkward and upset, a little red around the eyes now that Sid was looking closely. “I think something wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong, G.”

“You don’t fix ice,” Geno clarified, charging ahead in one breath. “Normal, you make sure no camera, no baby Penguins. You fix ice. You hate bad ice.”

Sid blinked. They rarely talked about his ability, not openly. They hinted about it. Geno always kind of knew, but it was largely irrelevant. It only came up occasionally, like when Sid needed to fix the practice ice or when he was subtly refreshing a cold pack for Geno’s knee. It was never something he liked to advertise or think too much about.

“Only when you have bad head day, you don’t fix. Maybe, sometime, when you real mad. You don’t fix when something wrong.”

“I...” Sid started, grasping for words. Had Geno really been paying that much attention to when he fixed the ice over the years? Had he been that transparent about when he used his ability?

“I think something wrong today,” Geno prodded. When Sid started to protest, he reached down for Sid’s wrist and pulled his hand up to eye level. The Gatorade in Sid’s hand was half frozen. Geno looked miserable. “You hurt? Or maybe... Maybe mad?”

Sid couldn’t talk. He couldn’t draw enough breath to say anything. “I’m not mad,” Sid managed, but his voice betrayed him by breaking. He looked around abruptly, mortifyingly aware of the tears threatening at the corners of his eyes. “G, we’re at practice. This isn’t...”

Geno nodded and jerked his head toward the nearby tunnel. He led Sid down toward the ice and Sid followed. They both knew it was the emptiest place in the building for the hour or so following a closed skate. 

The Zamboni was long gone, but Sid could see large puddles of standing water on the surface. No one was around. Geno stopped them just short of the bench and looked out. “Sid. Gatorade is frozen, ice not frozen.”

“I can see that, okay? I tried to fix it, but I can’t just turn it on and off like a switch.”

“You don’t have this problem before.”

Sid rolled his eyes and crossed his arms to shield himself from Geno. “Jesus... Are you kidding me?”

“No, I’m not,” Geno said earnestly. “I want to help.”

Sid laughed bitterly and shook his head. Geno hesitated and looked down. 

“So you mad at me? I think, when I leave, we’re okay.”

“Geno,” Sid groaned. He rubbed his eyes with a hand in frustration. “We’re... going to be okay. We just have to get back to a place where we can be.”

Geno hit him with a doubtful look which drifted out toward the ice. “What we do now? Swim?”

Sid huffed, but he couldn’t deny the ice looked terrible. He stared at a wet patch near the bench and took a steadying breath. “Look... Yeah. After last night, I’m too upset to fix it.”

Geno’s eyebrows shot up, clearly shocked by his candor. 

“I’m trying, here. You just really sprung this on me. We’ve had this great relationship, and now it’s over-”

Geno snorted. “It’s not relationship, Sid. Is fuckbuddies.”

“Not to me,” Sid said with a grimace, eyes sliding away to look anywhere but Geno. 

“That’s relationship to you?” Geno asked, his voice incredulous and undiplomatic. “Be like friend all the time, play hockey, then maybe fuck in hotel room? Summer, we act like nothing. You don’t visit, don’t want come to Miami. That’s how you treat boyfriend?”

Sid cringed. Geno’s outrage contrasted terribly with the previous night, when he’d so gently explained that he couldn’t do this anymore. After almost two years of sleeping together, they had to be done. For Sid, it had been the best relationship of his life, a romance founded on the friendship they’d built around hockey. Apparently, for Geno, it hadn’t been a relationship at all. 

The Gatorade bottle cracked loudly in his hand and he put it down on the boards. The plastic was shattered around the lid. Red ice spiked out of the crack where the last of the liquid had flash-frozen and forced its way out.

Geno breathed out long and slow. “Okay. Good to know. Maybe would be better last night, so I don’t spend all night awake and really sad.” He still sounded annoyed, which got Sid’s back up.

“Why were you sad? You were the one who broke up with me.”

“Because I want you to say we date, not break up!”

“Then say that, Geno, god. I’m not a mind reader!”

“I’m say now!” Geno snapped.

They both hesitated a moment before Sid softened. His irritation smoothed over. “Maybe we need to work on our communication, eh?” he said with a wry smile.

Geno returned his smile less wearily and reached for his hand. As soon as he touched Sid’s skin, he gasped. “So cold, Sid. Make warm up.” He folded Sid’s hand between his own and brought it up to breathe warm air on it. 

“It doesn’t really work like that,” Sid mumbled. Geno shot him a questioning look over their joined hands and Sid forced himself to elaborate. “It’s like... I dunno. It’s hard to explain. Normally, I just reach out and freeze things. I think about dropping the temperature and it happens. I don’t usually keep it in me, you know?”

“You freeze yourself?” Geno asked, looking worried.

“Yeah, I guess. It goes kind of haywire sometimes. If I don’t keep it in, I’m not sure what would happen. I might hurt someone.”

“Fix ice maybe help?”

Sid shook his head. “No, not right now. I don’t have enough control. It’ll just crack in half if I try. Freeze all the boards.” 

Geno nodded and rubbed Sid’s hand between his own. 

“The cold doesn’t really affect me, though,” Sid reminded him gently. “I don’t feel it.”

“I know,” Geno said, but he kept futilely trying to warm Sid’s hand. He even reached down for the other one, gripping them both between his own warm palms.

“So, um... When you say date. What do you mean?”

Geno looked more fond than exasperated with him, which was a relief. “Don’t worry. Nothing scary.”

“I’m not scared. I just want to know what you expect. So I can meet that expectation.”

Geno rolled his eyes at that. “It’s not training camp, Sid. I don’t know. Can’t give you list of thing: good boyfriend list.”

Sid frowned and thought back on their conversation. “You wanted me to come with you to Miami.”

Geno shrugged, but wouldn’t look at him. “It’s okay, Sid. I know you don’t really want-”

“Don’t do that. You can’t back off me now. Tell me for real.”

Geno gave him a pained look. 

“C’mon. Give it to me. Nobody can improve without criticism.”

Geno huffed. “It’s not Miami. It’s you. You doing this. Even now, you doing this.”

That stung. Sid pulled his hands back and swallowed. “What am I doing?”

“Always, you’re work on problem. Like how you practice wrist shot, so always is best. How much work that takes?”

Sid flushed hard at that. “There’s nothing wrong with practicing. Wanting to improve.”

“You don’t want ‘improve.’ You want perfect.”

Geno was sounding frustrated again, like he was reconsidering whether they could even do this. Sid’s throat felt tight. He was getting a little desperate, hoping Geno wouldn’t decide he was right in the first place to walk away. 

“I don’t understand. Help me out. What am I doing wrong?”

“Sid...”

“I’m serious. I don’t want to lose you over something I could fix. Just tell me what I need to do.”

Geno sighed and thought for a while before he said, “Stop hide ice cream.”

Sid stared at him, hoping he would start to make sense. Geno shrugged, looking a little sheepish but determined to make his point.

“You hide behind broccoli. It’s bad for you. Break diet.”

Sid floundered. “You think I should stick to the diet?” he asked carefully, trying not to feel a little hurt. 

“No, ” Geno groaned. “You do because maybe people think, Sid don’t have sweet things. Always you do what trainers say. You fake like you don’t eat.”

Geno was totally right. Sid had a pint of rocky road ice cream tucked away behind his frozen vegetables. He ate it right out of the carton whenever he felt a sweets craving, which was admittedly pretty often. And he would never tell the trainers about it. He figured, what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them. 

“I think you want make everybody happy,” Geno pressed. “So maybe, if you come to me for summer, maybe somebody will see. Maybe they think things. Maybe they not so happy.”

Sid was starting to get it. “You think I can’t handle it if people find out we’re dating.”

“I think you don’t like people to see you. Like this,” he reached for Sid’s freezing hands again. “You have trouble all morning. Try to keep from see. Don’t tell trainer.”

“I’m not telling anyone, Geno. Nobody can know. Not about this.”

“ _I_ know,” Geno insisted. “You see? I know this. I know about ice cream. I see you. I think you don’t like, but I don’t like you pretend. Whole everybody see perfect Sidney Crosby. I don't want to see.”

Sid never thought his ice cream habit would become a metaphor for his inadequacies as a boyfriend, but he could work with it. He tugged at one of Geno’s hands like he needed to get his attention. 

“You’re right. I’m not comfortable with the whole world knowing my personal stuff. I probably won’t ever be, considering,” he said with a shrug. “I have my reasons, you know. And it’s hard, after a long time, to break certain habits.”

Geno looked daunted by that, but also trusting, like he knew Sid was trying his best. 

“I’ll probably still hide the ice cream,” Sid said honestly with a sheepish shrug. “But I could add cookie dough to the stash. If you want.”

A grin twitched at Geno’s mouth. It was his favorite, and Sid knew it.

“It can be our secret. Together. Like this.” He nodded at the flash-frozen Gatorade, just beginning to bead with condensation. 

“Sid,” Geno said, sounding a little choked up. 

“Is that an okay start, at least?” Sid asked hopefully. 

Geno crowded into Sid’s space to hug him. “It’s okay,” he said, hoarse voice muffled against Sid’s shoulder. 

They stood there hugging for a long time, much longer than Sid would be able to justify as friendly if anyone saw. Geno went from sniffling into his shoulder to lightly trembling while Sid petted his back. When he finally pulled back, it was with a weak smile.

"Want to kiss you," Geno said. 

"Okay.

Geno hesitated like he wasn't sure if Sid was serious. "Now?" 

"Somebody might see, eh?" Sid teased, even though his heart was pounding. 

Geno lit up, obviously delighted, and leaned in. Sid tipped his chin up, not backing down when Geno hesitated. He was allowing Sid to tap out, to quit. That was the last thing Sid wanted to do. He closed the rest of the gap between them and pressed their lips together.

Geno seemed too shocked to move for a second, but he quickly got with the program, angling to end the chastity of the kiss. Every time he pressed, Sid yielded until they were outright making out on the bench.

They parted a little out of breath, and Geno gaped at him.

"Want to take this home?" Sid asked. He backed away and held out his hand, hoping to prompt Geno to follow.

Geno took his hand and fell into step with him, making their leisurely way back to the dressing room. They were halfway down the tunnel when Geno squeezed his hand, stopped, and turned a manic smile at him.

"What?" Sid asked, unable to help a grin back.

"Sid. You warm." He held up their joined hands, delighted. "I fix!" 

Sid barked a laugh and shook his head. "You fixed it, eh?"

Geno nodded firmly. "With kiss. See, is easy. Anytime you feel cold, I kiss and you okay. You need me."

Sid's chest felt full of joy watching Geno gloat. It wouldn't always be so easy, he knew, but Geno's delight couldn't be contained. Besides, who could say whether a kiss would fix him every time? It couldn't hurt to try and find out.

**Author's Note:**

> P.S., I just want to write Sid being the wrong temperature, okay? Apparently, it's really important to me.


End file.
